Industry: on "developers getting lazy"

[stevesan]

Judging from forums and blog posts, a lot of gamers these days seem to think that developers are somehow getting "lazier" compared to previous generations. Games are shorter these days and seem to have less depth and/or creativity. I'm gonna talk about why this is absolutely NOT a result of developer laziness, what are the real reasons, and what we gamers can do to help change it.

Developers are not getting lazier. By developers, I mean the people actually building the game - the coders, artists, designers, testers, etc. They're still working horrible crunch hours for the months before release, and they get paid pretty poorly compared to what they could be doing (well, for coders at least. I can't really speak for the other disciplines). It's also pretty uncreative work, which I'll touch on later.

So why then are games shorter and less fun, seemingly? Because the bar for everything from graphics, sound, graphics, writing, graphics, and more graphics has been raised to an arguably unreasonable level. So as a developer, you spend most of your time getting your game to look/sound good rather than actually tweaking/creating gameplay (thus, more uncreative work for everyone). This is a huge burden on developers. Often times, a cool gameplay feature will get implemented, but then it'll get cut because it doesn't look good enough ("oh no, this is clipping through the character! can't have it."). So, more wasted time that could've contributed to gameplay.

Can you imagine how much time and resources were put into making Altair animate perfectly in Assassin's Creed? I bet it was a lot. Yet, wouldn't you rather they spend that time making more interesting gameplay? Would you put up with some animation pops here and there if those eves-dropping missions were replaced with more assassination missions?

What can we as gamers do to fix these poorly guided priorities? I'm not saying anything new about graphics over gameplay, but the industry continues to focus on graphics - are they just deaf to our cries? What's going on here?

Maybe it's the reviewers. Reviewers still place a lot of emphasis on graphics and they point out visual glitches a lot. So as a result, developers are forced to spend undue time addressing these issues, trying to get those review points from GameSpot. Maybe as consumers, we should boycott any review site that spends more than a paragraph talking about non-gameplay issues (sound, graphics, story, etc.). This may put the industry back on the right road of innovative, deep, and fun gameplay. Just a thought.

What do you guys think that we, as gaming consumers, can do to get the industry back where we want it? We have the power - we spend the money. But something's not being communicated here...

 

[Projekt Spartan]

I think that we should just give the game developers more time. I mean if they are always rushing and have to spend 23 hours during crunch time working before a game releases, people are going to cut corners (and gameplay features) to meet the release deadline that has been given to them. I dont think that anything needs to be taken away from grampics to make gameplay mechanics better, i just think that more time is needed all around.

 

[JimboG]

I would say boycott games that don't fulfill our needs, but that is impossible, not to mention stupid. Perhaps we should contact people in the industry who genuinely care about consumer needs, and ask them to send out surveys/feedback forms that mean something for a change.

Another way of turning this around would be buying more indie games, donating small amounts of money to people who are willing to make games on a personal level, and wont alienate the more intelligent among us by cramming as many fast cars/explosions into a game as possible.

 

[stevesan]

I think that we should just give the game developers more time. I mean if they are always rushing and have to spend 23 hours during crunch time working before a game releases, people are going to cut corners (and gameplay features) to meet the release deadline that has been given to them. I dont think that anything needs to be taken away from grampics to make gameplay mechanics better, i just think that more time is needed all around.

That certainly would help. But from the point of view of the publishers (ie. he who has the gold), I see 2 issues with more time:

1) The more time you spend on a game, the more likely it'll look "dated." This, I think, is another false concern perpetuated by reviewers. Reviewers often pan a game for looking past-gen, such as Kane & Lynch. Yet, this clearly doesn't matter considering the success of Blizzard's games, which are always "dated" graphics wise. So, let's also boycott reviewers that call any game graphically "dated."

2) The biggie: Twice the time costs about twice the money (developers are paid on salary). Some companies can afford this, like Blizzard, 3D Realms, etc. But this isn't a viable option for most studios. You would have to argue that, by spending more time in development leads to far more revenues. Maybe this is true? That's something that maybe should be researched.

 

[wilsonscrazybed]

Maybe it's the reviewers. Reviewers still place a lot of emphasis on graphics and they point out visual glitches a lot. So as a result, developers are forced to spend undue time addressing these issues, trying to get those review points from GameSpot. Maybe as consumers, we should boycott any review site that spends more than a paragraph talking about non-gameplay issues (sound, graphics, story, etc.). This may put the industry back on the right road of innovative, deep, and fun gameplay. Just a thought.

I think it's the buyers. I like to compare this decade in games with the 1980s for movies. We live in a decade where companies have realized that there is big corporate money to be made in gaming.

If the 90s for gamers were sort of the Honeymoon period, where technology was advancing and lots of small companies had big dreams. Then we're now in the period where technology is stagnating, and big companies have dreams of little games that make big money. Really the blame isn't so much on the companies that make the games as the people who fuel the companies by buying games based only on one facet of what makes a game good.

There is a growing world demand for games, and the public is just starting to be able to tell a good game from a bad one. Moreover people new to the idea of "interactive entertainment" are just entering the market in force as well. The worst bit is that unlike movie culture games still aren't viewed as an art form. That means that a lot of developers are content with shirking their artistic mantels and simply create technically "good" games with out the depth of vision that other art forms require.

There are a lot of good fun games out there, buy those. Shoplift the rest.

 

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Lazy may not be the correct word, but there is a dearth of imagination these days as games tend to push towards the same old thing all the time.

 

[broadband]

Lazy may not be the correct word, but there is a dearth of imagination these days as games tend to push towards the same old thing all the time.

yeah specially with the WW2 games, at least someone should try to make another wolfestein or something

 

[Larenxis]

Does the average gaming company have focus groups?

 

[squirrelman42]

I loved Medal of Honor years ago. I never want to see another WW2 game again until they've explored every other option or unearth some history that changes WW2 as we know it.

 

[Count_de_Monet]

Judging from forums and blog posts, a lot of gamers these days seem to think that developers are somehow getting "lazier" compared to previous generations. Games are shorter these days and seem to have less depth and/or creativity. I'm gonna talk about why this is absolutely NOT a result of developer laziness, what are the real reasons, and what we gamers can do to help change it.

And yet the fact remains that games these days do lack depth of storyline, intricacy of gameplay, most of the quirky little things that marked an individual developer's style, and generally restrict innovation to creating a new weapon or a somewhat newish setting. That isn't to say there aren't revolutions such as the popularization of ragdoll physics and implementation of a physics engine in first person shooters since Half Life 2, however, there are also four Call of Duty games which have practically the same gameplay with little additions added on in each successive title to make them 'new'.

Developers are not getting lazier. By developers, I mean the people actually building the game - the coders, artists, designers, testers, etc. They're still working horrible crunch hours for the months before release, and they get paid pretty poorly compared to what they could be doing (well, for coders at least. I can't really speak for the other disciplines). It's also pretty uncreative work, which I'll touch on later.

Putting a lot of hours into a game doesn't exempt developers from being called lazy. I've put twenty or thirty hours of work into a project just to turn it in and be accused of laziness because one part of it was less developed than another part. I fully admit my laziness in ignoring one part of my project to further develop another part and putting an extreme amount of effort into the project doesn't absolve me of this laziness. So, while the "uncreative" jobs within a developer's team may be working as hard as they possibly can the team as a whole is still lazy for ignoring a critical part of their project.

So why then are games shorter and less fun, seemingly? Because the bar for everything from graphics, sound, graphics, writing, graphics, and more graphics has been raised to an arguably unreasonable level. So as a developer, you spend most of your time getting your game to look/sound good rather than actually tweaking/creating gameplay (thus, more uncreative work for everyone). This is a huge burden on developers. Often times, a cool gameplay feature will get implemented, but then it'll get cut because it doesn't look good enough ("oh no, this is clipping through the character! can't have it."). So, more wasted time that could've contributed to gameplay.

I think the only bar which has moved up significantly is graphics (maybe sound, but I haven't heard sound in a game which really wowed me since Command & Conquer used real music instead of midi files). The bar for storyline has stayed the same; people still want a well written and engrossing storyline, however, expectations are so low you can deliver a game with a poor story and the only people complaining are people like us. The bar for innovation suffers much like the one for storyline, people just want something a little new and not a completely groundbreaking game so they will settle for a new gun or a new angle (like being able to use vehicles when you couldn't in the previous game in any given series). It takes a really cool gun to make me admit it's truly innovative, it has to really change the way you look at the game's world and add something new to how you treat situation. Once again, I throw a HL2 fan favorite into the mix by pointing at the gravity gun. It may be a gimmick but it added a level of immersion into your surroundings because you were always looking for new stuff to toss at the bad guys (and who doesn't love the saw blades?) and gave you new ways of looking at situations instead of just "Pop out, shoot bullets, hide to reload, rinse and repeat".

Can you imagine how much time and resources were put into making Altair animate perfectly in Assassin's Creed? I bet it was a lot. Yet, wouldn't you rather they spend that time making more interesting gameplay? Would you put up with some animation pops here and there if those eves-dropping missions were replaced with more assassination missions?

Why should people have to suffer through terrible gameplay for shiny graphics? Maybe I'm mistaken but don't most games have programmers do the programming and writers do the writing? Just because Group A is spending all it's time fixing graphics bugs doesn't mean Group B should be absolved of dropping the ball on the story. Maybe I'm missing something and the people who come up with the idea also do the writing, voice acting, programming and testing but I doubt it.

What can we as gamers do to fix these poorly guided priorities? I'm not saying anything new about graphics over gameplay, but the industry continues to focus on graphics - are they just deaf to our cries? What's going on here?

Our cries are small and easily ignored especially among the swarm of Halo fanboys blowing their loads over each Halo game that comes out even though it's basically the same game over and over again. It's not like this is a new thing either, how many Might and Magic games have there been and how different was one from another? Many people don't want a challenge, they don't even really want something new, they just want a game they like to do what they know they like but be a little prettier and as long as that stays true the gaming industry won't be pushed into developing games with any more creativity than Hollywood in developing movies.

Maybe it's the reviewers. Reviewers still place a lot of emphasis on graphics and they point out visual glitches a lot. So as a result, developers are forced to spend undue time addressing these issues, trying to get those review points from GameSpot. Maybe as consumers, we should boycott any review site that spends more than a paragraph talking about non-gameplay issues (sound, graphics, story, etc.). This may put the industry back on the right road of innovative, deep, and fun gameplay. Just a thought.

Maybe reviews hold some of the blame but I don't think they hold much.

What do you guys think that we, as gaming consumers, can do to get the industry back where we want it? We have the power - we spend the money. But something's not being communicated here...

I think we first have to realize that the games which we compare new games to come from a very small group and that even well-loved classics like Doom were pretty stupid if you turn the same critical eye at them that you used on Bioshock. The only thing that saves them is perspective because a game could only do so much back then, however, these days there is so much potential and so few people who seem willing to push the envelope.

There are a lot of culprits and none of them have a simple fix. Gaming isn't quite as frowned upon by the masses as it once was so far more people with far less nerdy backgrounds are "gamers". I've played CS: Source with people who I would never have pegged as gamers in the past and their tastes just aren't as refined as me, however, there are far more of them and far less of me. They have the numbers, they have the money, so they are the ones who are marketed to.

That brings me to my next point, the commercialization of games. All the little companies are being eaten up by mega-corporations like EA and every time that little bit of private innovation gets absorbed by another commercial monster what they produce becomes instantly watered down.

I'm sure I could go on forever but I have a headache and pie is calling me plus I doubt many people got this far down the post.

 

[Jack Spencer Jr]

... and as long as that stays true the gaming industry won't be pushed into developing games with any more creativity than Hollywood in developing movies.

[tangent]The problem in Hollywood is that they tend to look for something that has not been done before, usually one good scene or vaguely new concept is enough to get a film green lit. This can result in good movies, like Alien which was picked up because of the chest burster scene. 48 Hours was probably similarly picked up because of the scene where Eddie Murphy's character stares down an entire bar full of rednecks.

Then there are movies like Lindsay Lohan's last flick, I Know Who Killed Me, which was picked up because of the "original" concept of stigmatic twins. That is the Corsican brothers except the one twin doesn't just feel what the other twin is feeling, but actual wounds spontaneously appear on their body. That is, if you shoot a stigmatic twin in the head, a bullet hole would for on his twin's head.

The point I'm trying to make is it's not so much a lack of creativity as a lack of craft, as both I Know Who Killed Me and 48 Hours have very pedestrian plots, and an inability to recognize that an new idea can also be a really frickin' stupid idea. [/tangent]

And I would imagine something similar is happening in gaming, what with a focus being on the graphics and maybe stuff like physics engines without really putting much thought into whether these things are at all fun. Or perhaps how to use these things in a way that is fun rather than their very existence being an end unto itself.

 

[Count_de_Monet]

It's a theme to human history: Don't change the formula unless it stops working.

I honestly don't expect my video games to succeed where government, religion, and every other form of art and entertainment haven't but it would be nice.

 

[Booze Zombie]

I can think of one way of improving games. Splitting the load.

If a big company has a game under development, why doesn't it get another company to take part of the load. I mean, imagine how awesome Assassin's Creed would have been if you had E.A on combat, Valve on graphics and anti-clipping and Timesplitter's story writers on... well, the story. It would have rocked!

Effectively, I'm suggesting that games become the end result of a profitable work-together system of some sort.

 

[stevesan]

Can you imagine how much time and resources were put into making Altair animate perfectly in Assassin's Creed? I bet it was a lot. Yet, wouldn't you rather they spend that time making more interesting gameplay? Would you put up with some animation pops here and there if those eves-dropping missions were replaced with more assassination missions?

Why should people have to suffer through terrible gameplay for shiny graphics? Maybe I'm mistaken but don't most games have programmers do the programming and writers do the writing? Just because Group A is spending all it's time fixing graphics bugs doesn't mean Group B should be absolved of dropping the ball on the story. Maybe I'm missing something and the people who come up with the idea also do the writing, voice acting, programming and testing but I doubt it.

Game dev just isn't that cleanly split. There are inter-dependencies all over the place.

Let's say design comes up with a great idea for a gameplay mode. To do it, they need some new scripting features (code), some new animations (art), some new dialogue (writing), and some new UI (code and art). But, programmers are too busy making Altair's feet look right when he climbs a ledge. And maybe they solve it, but the solution requires that the art guys go in and change how each ledge is shaped and also re-do some animations. So for a good week or two, design just sits there and twiddles their thumbs.

 

[stevesan]

I can think of one way of improving games. Splitting the load.

If a big company has a game under development, why doesn't it get another company to take part of the load. I mean, imagine how awesome Assassin's Creed would have been if you had E.A on combat, Valve on graphics and anti-clipping and Timesplitter's story writers on... well, the story. It would have rocked!

Effectively, I'm suggesting that games become the end result of a profitable work-together system of some sort.

This is happening, but not exactly as how you describe it. If you license the Source engine, you kinda have Valve on graphics. And if TimeSplitters' writers decide to become consultants, you can hire them too.

So it isn't companies partnering up, but rather the talent/technology being hired out to more companies. Hollywood (I think) works more in this way, where people aren't employed by a studio, but rather jump around from project to project, working for the highest bidder. Some people think this is the path that video games should take, and there are plenty of developers working as consultants already. So maybe in the future, we'll see this become the norm.

I suppose this would allow for better game quality, but the issue I'm talking about still remains, just in another form. Now the question is, do you spend $2 million to license an awesome graphics engine, or just spend $1 mil on the engine so you have $1 mil more to hire some great designers?

 

[stevesan]

Lazy may not be the correct word, but there is a dearth of imagination these days as games tend to push towards the same old thing all the time.

But I would argue that it's not dearth of imagination either. The industry is full of imaginative people. It's just that imaginative gameplay is very costly to get right, due to the reasons I mentioned above. And usually, it's so costly that it ends up feeling "tacked on" (like, time manipulation in TimeShift) or just turns out crappy (Lair..).

An example of imaginative gameplay done right was Portal. They succeeded by limiting the scope of their game. So maybe these shorter $20 games are the way to explore the medium. Maybe the industry should start doing that more.

 

[stevesan]

What can we as gamers do to fix these poorly guided priorities? I'm not saying anything new about graphics over gameplay, but the industry continues to focus on graphics - are they just deaf to our cries? What's going on here?

Our cries are small and easily ignored especially among the swarm of Halo fanboys blowing their loads over each Halo game that comes out even though it's basically the same game over and over again. It's not like this is a new thing either, how many Might and Magic games have there been and how different was one from another? Many people don't want a challenge, they don't even really want something new, they just want a game they like to do what they know they like but be a little prettier and as long as that stays true the gaming industry won't be pushed into developing games with any more creativity than Hollywood in developing movies.

You're right about that, so let me refine my argument.

I actually have no problem with "blockbusters" - in fact, I think it's great. If your studio is smart enough to recognize easy money and you capitalize on it, good for you.

The developers I'm defending, and would like to help, are those developers that actually, honest to God, try to innovate. An example would be Saber Interactive with TimeShift. They had a really cool piece of technology that could've become an awesome game, like Portal. But what was the result? A "me too" FPS where the time-control technology ended up feeling like a cheap, worthless gimmick. That breaks my heart.

And I don't think it's fair nor productive to accuse Saber of being "lazy" or "unimaginative." I bet you they tried their best to put in cool, creative time puzzles and combat scenarios. But ultimately, their publishers forced them to cut a lot of it cuz it didn't look good enough. Like, they only kept the features that looked perfect (such as grabbing the gun out of enemy hands). I'd love to know how many other ideas they had but had to scrap or limit cuz they couldn't get it looking good enough - even if it was working mechanics-wise - in time.

I think it'd be a lot more productive to send a message to these developers and their publishers, that it's OK if things don't look perfect or realistic. It's OK if the grappling hook goes through enemies sometimes, just let me play with the damn thing anyway! Some developers realize this. Take GTA3 for example: if your car is stuck in a thin alley and you want to get out, your character will just teleport out of the car - no animation. Sure, it looks kinda bad, but I'm sure no one actually cared. A lesser developer would've freaked out and only let you get in/out of cars on roads or something (like, grappling hooks that only work in certain hot spots).

 

[hickwarrior]

Maybe the main problem is also the new gamers, as stated in this thread. The buzz advert, free advertising basically not a game, might give more boost to this problem. Also, since there are a ton of new gamers, they are easily impressed(i'm sure i would be, but let's not digress) by what the machines can pump out for graphics. Such people just don't realize that graphics are just part of a game, that isn't that fun.

You play a game, and eventually, graphics will be so sub-par, that you won't look at them while playing a game. even if a game should be photo realistic, You won't be paying attention to it, once yo uare immersed in the game itself. It's such a waste that people do not understand, other than by experiencing it.

That's what i wanted to say.

 

[shadow skill]

If Saber had not done it as a shooter it almost certainly would have turned into a prince of perisa type game which may have actually been worse than what they did come up with. I really think that the gane just came out at the wrong time. Having played the demo I would say that being able to slow and stop time was really fun, however the game does not do much else to make it stand out from the bigger name games that are out or are on the horizon.

 

[Dragonclaw]

Speaking as an older gamer (Been a gamer since the old PONG days and still have every console from the 2600 and the Vectrex in my closet) I actually PREFER shorter games. Sure, back in the old days I could pop in a 50+ hour epic and blast right through it...but now their are a lot of other things to take up my time...job, wife, the kids...so a long epic game could take me forever to finish...if I even got to see the end before some new game came on the scene to distract me.

Which is another point I can see...a shorter game allows the game to be done by the time the next "must buy" game hits the market. Developers don't want to miss sales on Mass Effect because players are still deeply into Assassin's Creed.